Arthur C. Donart, PhD wrote this essay.
A Sunday, May 9, 2021, Washington Post article by Susannah George and Sharif Hassan elucidates the tragedy of a horrible bombing of a Hazara girls’ school. This attack killed at least 50 girls and wounded 100 others. These Islamic extremist view educating women as being contrary to God’s (Allah’s) wishes. If knowledge is power, then, according to their views, women should not have power. In their thinking, it is God’s will that women be subordinate to men.
Many strands of Christianity, even in our own Country and even today, either explicitly or implicitly are in agreement with these extreme Islamists. Women do not–nor are they allowed to–hold any positions of power/authority in their organizations, e.g. Catholic Church Perhaps the Ten Commandments gives us a clue to this misogyny.
There are two sets of the Ten Commandments: Exodus Chapter 20 and Deuteronomy Chapter 5. They are quite similar except in Exodus, where it is written, “You shall not covet (conspire to get) your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet (conspire to get) your neighbor’s wife, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything else that belongs to him.”
Some Priestly Scribe, working on committing the oral tradition to writing, during the Babylonian exile corrected the order in Deuteronomy Chapter 5. He put wife before house. Evidently he thought a wife was a more valuable piece of property than a house. Therein lies the problem.
First of all, women were not taught to read and write. Thus, all scribes were men. Might there not be a bit of bias against women in what they wrote? Maybe the Deuteronomist Scribe’s wife let him know she was a lot more important than his house. “Just what do you think your house would look like without me, dear?”
Secondly, and of greater importance, is the idea that a wife, like the male and female slave, the ox, and ass, are the man’s property. He owns them. This, from a group of Hebrews who fled Egypt, because they were enslaved! We see a relic of this in our marriage ceremony, when the father of the bride gives away his daughter. Undeniably, in time past, there existed a patriarchal society, where “Father knows best,” even if “Father” is dumber than his ass (sorry, I meant ox). The Taliban and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) are still in that age. Pray God that they evolve.
Unfortunately, in their desire to please God, the Taliban and those of similar thinking use their power to force their belief on (us) these poor “infidels.” God forbid that we should eat pork, drink beer, or treat women as equals!
Their sin is thinking that God needs their help and not that we need God’s help. They need to realize that, we cannot own other people. They all belong to God. God loves them all and so should we.
Bombing a Hazara girls’ school is an abomination! “Male and female He created them.”